


death wheare is thy sting

by bastaerd



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assisted Suicide, Depictions of Illness, Euthanasia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:15:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25087519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: “Did it ease him?”It had sounded to him like a more merciful question before he asked it. John can answer it readily, though.“I didn’t stay long enough to see,” he replies. “I thought they would be better left alone."“If he asked for it, he must have known it would.”
Relationships: John Bridgens/Harry Peglar
Comments: 13
Kudos: 22





	death wheare is thy sting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iamnassau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamnassau/gifts).



> eliza said a sad thing in the discord & gave me permission to take it & run  
> title taken from the peglar papers  
> also my god i am all over the place w the literary references but its 5:38 AM so it's not like i can be blamed for that

John knows his fingertips smell of the residue from the stopper of the bottle he had pushed into Crozier’s hand, as he leaves the two captains with it, trying not to think of hemlock. The thought to worry about leaving the two of them with the full bottle occurs to him briefly, but he knows that _Here’s yet some liquor left_ comes before _Goodnight, sweet prince,_ and having heard the latter, but not the former should not put him as much at ease as it does, which is not appreciably much. Comforts are rare and all the more precious here. John returns to his own.

* * *

When John arrives at the tent he shares with Henry, he swipes his cuff against his eyes as if to get that out of the way before the other man might see the tears, but he has never been able to fool him, just as Henry has never been able to fool John. As John settles down beside him, Henry pushes himself up on his elbows, wincing at the feeling of his bruises against the hard ground, and presses John’s shoulder until he finally turns to face him. The tears have stopped falling-- there were just the two or three of them, after all, and even that was a surprise-- but they still glisten in John’s ever sad eyes. He wipes his hands on his trousers before letting Henry, with his meager remaining strength, pull him closer.

“Oh, Henry,” he breathes, lips twisting into something he cannot school into shape. He is no stranger to tragedy. Henry prefers the stuff that makes him think beyond plain despair, but John can appreciate sadness, when he can feel it echoing from the author’s bones to his own. When there is something to be held and beheld, rather than something to be meted out against unwitting subjects, as if in punishment. As long as he has known John, he has always been kind like that.

“John,” says Henry, brows furrowing, hand inching higher on John’s shoulder until it reaches the crook of his neck. There, it settles. His thumb finds the tender spot under John’s ear and sits there. “What is it?”

“The captain died,” John tells him. For a moment, Henry is silent.

“Crozier?”

“No.”

They had both seen Fitzjames fall, and then fall again, pulling. Henry hadn’t needed to ask to know which captain it was, but for a moment, a sharp, guilty hope had sprung in his chest, not that Crozier had died, but that perhaps Fitzjames, weak and bleeding from the scalp and the arm and the ribs, had outlived a healthy man. Perhaps Henry might do the same; he sees the same hope, in its inverse, in John’s eyes. It must be a short-lived hope, because John has never been able to be anything but honest, but he has also never been able to be anything but kind.

Not once has he admitted aloud that Henry will succumb. Perhaps he has not even admitted it to himself.

A heavy sigh warms the air between them, only for a moment. John draws in a breath that stutters.

“Were you there to see it?” Henry asks him.

“No,” John answers, looking both sorry and relieved for it. “No, I wasn’t.” _I couldn’t_ remains unsaid, but Henry reads it on John’s face. He has come to understand each letter and mark of punctuation there as fluently as if he has been literate in it his entire life.

“He was in pain-- the captain,” John says, as if dredging it up from some deep, rocky place. “They both were, Fitzjames from his suffering and Crozier from watching him go through it.” He pauses here, presses his eyes shut for a moment, as if they have been burned by some reflection of light. “What I gave them… I hope it has put the both of them to ease.”

“Did he ask for it?”

“Crozier?”

“No.”

Henry watches John face the decision of either turning his face away or letting him see what plays out there. He makes an abortive attempt at beginning a sentence, cuts himself off, starts again.

“Henry…”

Shaking his head, Henry adds, “Did it ease him?”

It had sounded to him like a more merciful question before he asked it. John can answer it readily, though.

“I didn’t stay long enough to see,” he replies. “I thought they would be better left alone.”

“If he asked for it, he must have known it would.” 

John seems to have nothing to say about that. The truth of it hangs between them like a stretch of rope, each of them holding either end of it, neither willing to let go, nor to acknowledge that they have it in their grip. Taking a breath, Henry continues on.

“Other men have complained of it, the ache in their joints like broken shards of glass being ground together,” he reminds John, willing him to look him in the eyes as he had before, when it was only bruises and tiny scabs on his scalp. There will come a day in the near future, so near it may as well be tomorrow, when he won’t be able to get up from the ground. Won’t be able to haul the boats. Will be debated over, like the supplies and personal belongings left back on the ships. Henry Peglar will go the same route as the books John had forced himself to part with. In particular, he thinks of a small tome of collected Greek myths, left in that shelf above where John slept. It had been left behind only because John knew the stories by heart, and, in Henry’s opinion, told them far better than anyone else could.

The thing that struck him the most was that the gods rarely punished those who had wronged them with the penalty of death. What they gave them instead was eternity, long and painful, cordoned off from the notion of the absolute. Sisyphus, forever relegated to an impossible task and forever crushed by its failure. Prometheus, chained to an island in an endless sea, tortured by a crow that pecked out his liver. Tantalus, always reaching for a fruit he would never grasp. Henry wondered first if the Northwest Passage might be their boulder, then if Beechey might be their island, and now… well, now he finds himself longing for a bite of fresh fruit.

Eternity is a punishment. Eternity brings with it pain without the relief of an end to it. He understands why Fitzjames asked to be set free from it, though he doesn’t know exactly how the deed was done.

“That you are suffering,” John begins haltingly. He pauses and looks the way Hickey and Tozer ought to have looked with the nooses around their necks. “That you are suffering is as painful as though we share it. I couldn’t… if you asked, I would not be able to do for you as Captain Crozier did for Captain Fitzjames.”

They have spoken of Henry’s illness before, when he finds new bruises appear or blood someplace there hadn’t been before, and when he had spat a tooth into the palm of his hand. If there is ever a single word that may stave off the inevitable end for a moment longer, John will say it, as he says everything that might put it off. It has always been _It’s still the early days for you_ and _There’s time for it to turn around, Henry,_ but never has it been this. It may be as close to an admission of the truth as Henry will get.

John meets his eyes at last, his own shining wetly. His hand comes up, grips Henry’s wrist and his thumb rubs over the drum of his pulse.

“I’m no more able to let you live in pain without relief,” he goes on, his voice going so soft that Henry can just make out the consonants. “You must know that I would do anything you ask of me, Henry. That holds true, even here.”

Henry rubs the back of John’s neck, feeling the unwashed hair twist limply between his fingers. Alone and made brave by the vast emptiness of the landscape beyond their tent, he kisses him. When they part, John pulls out the kerchief he still keeps on him and wipes a smear of blood from Henry’s lip.

* * *

It is Hartnell and Little who help John lift Henry up and out of the boat. Again, it is John alone who carries him, holding him to his chest with an arm under his knees and the other around his back, keeping Henry’s head at an angle so that he can feel his breath against his neck. Had John another arm, he would hold Henry’s wrist with it, two fingers pressed to the point at which his pulse beat under the thin skin.

“John,” Henry had said, “can I sleep?” and has not said a word since then. His eyes stayed open, on the boat, blinking often enough so as not to be mistaken for a corpse, but lending little comfort other than that. John had made to take up his harness again, not wanting to make an unnecessary burden of himself by riding along when he could still walk and pull, but it was Little who stopped him with a hand briefly on his shoulder and a stilted, but meaningful look. He would have to forgive John for failing to press the matter as he climbed in behind Henry, sitting so that Henry could make a pillow of his ribs. If any of the men thought badly of him for doing so, they kept quiet. John was not of a mind to notice, too occupied with measuring the breathing of the man situated against his chest.

When they reach the spot where they set up camp, Henry is dull-eyed, the whites of them more ivory than white in a way John had put off from his mind until Henry had collapsed. Without John’s shoulder under it, his head lolls back bonelessly, exposing a beard dotted with scabs. His arms hang limp. His back is tacky, and as he gets him into his arms again, John knows that the scars from Henry’s singular lashing have softened enough to split apart. Grief comes to him like blood to the surface of the skin. He may have taken Goodsir’s place, but if Goodsir insisted that he wasn’t a doctor, then John is even less of one. He is a steward; he massages things into an orderly appearance. There is no orderly appearance to be had for grey gums and loose teeth.

No one asks him to help with bringing the camp up, though it is camp that shrinks every time they stop to erect it. Their numbers dwindle by the day, and more tragic is the fact that each of those numbers is a man. Henry probably knows them better than John does, social as he is, and young.

God. Henry is so young for this.

Even now, with white hairs growing in here and there that say more about his health than his age. Even with a body all sunken and spotted like an old man’s. Henry is too young to go before John.

The thought paralyzes John, as he sits in the tent he shares with Henry. He has stripped him of his sweater, using it to wipe the seepage from the opened welts on Henry’s back. There is barely more with which to clean it, but John removes his own sweater and lays it out underneath Henry’s back, and then trades the younger man’s shirt for his own. Henry groans as he is manhandled, and John hushes him while trying to be gentler, though he is already moving as slowly, as gently, as possible.

Henry’s blood sticks to John’s back. He swapped them not because it makes any real difference now whether or not the wounds are kept clean, but so that the discomfort will not be compounded with the rest. These are palliative measures. John knows that now.

He slips down beside Henry, rousing him from his soupy half-sleep. It’s the kind that is far from restful, and Henry groans again, not fully awake, but turning his head towards John preconsciously.

“John?” he mumbles. “Ought to be out.”

His words are slurring in a way that clearly bothers him, because he starts and stops the word “ought” twice. “John” came out perfectly.

“I did what I could do before they sent me back here,” John says, smiling back towards him. Henry’s face breaks into something fond in return.

“Meant _I_ ought to.”

“If that’s true, then I have no excuse, do I?”

There is a rasping of air that John has come to recognize as Henry’s laugh, burdened by sickness but no less cheerful.

“Alright, have your victory,” says Henry, fumbling blindly with the hand closest to John, who realizes what he means to do, and guides it towards his own. “Means I can steal you, and that makes me the real winner.”

“You’ve stolen me already, Henry,” John replies, clasping Henry’s hand close to his chest. “Heart and soul. There’s no taking me from yourself.”

The words are perhaps too serious for this conversation, but Henry’s eyes, dazed as they are, soften as they turn upwards towards John. The look on his face is happy. Worse than that-- content. John smiles back as his stomach plummets. 

“Just as there’s no taking me from you,” Henry breathes. Either he can’t read the expression on John’s face, or he recognizes it for what it is, and this is his way of-

Of doing things. This. As if there could be any way to soften it.

Still, John responds with an equally soft, “I know,” as he lifts Henry’s hand to his lips so the words can warm it. Then he holds it open, pressing the palm with his thumb while Henry’s fingers unfurl like the petals of a blooming flower. He presses his cheek to that palm, closing his eyes and breathing against it. The tips of Henry’s fingers, mostly just the first two, which have retained the most mobility, rub gently where they can reach, the edge of John’s hairline, oily but free of scabs. John has never felt less fortunate for that fact as he does now.

“Read to me, John?”

There are no more books. John casts his gaze about, hoping to find one tucked somewhere he had forgotten about, but comes up dry. Those he kept from Erebus would have been lucky to have survived the chaos of the mutineers’ would-be hangings.

“I’m sorry, Henry,” he says. “I have none.”

“That’s not true.”

Henry’s fingertips tap against the side of his face; John kisses the heel of his hand in affection.

“You’ve got so many of them,” Henry insists. “Here. I don’t care if they’re not exactly what the author wrote. I prefer your words over any of theirs,” and John is just as able now as he has ever been to say no to him.

Neither of them keep the time. John stays off the Voltaire, and talks of Troy and Wales, which is not so extraordinary a place but nor is it less fantastical, and recites poetry in between, to change the pace. He covers the stories Henry has not had time to read in as many words as he sees fit to, and affords each narrative with the care it deserves. He will not beleaguer Henry with boredom, though he has insisted on more than one occasion that he could sit and listen to John read the crew roster and spend every moment of it riveted.

Finally, John pauses, in the middle of deciding on a poem, meeting Henry’s eyes, and Henry watches silently. His face is so tired. It seems there is nothing left in him but what he spares for John, and it is that that guides John’s hand towards the correct bag, towards the half-full bottle with nothing against which to rattle.

Henry’s lips part soundlessly. His throat is soft under John’s thumb and forefinger as he massages the laudanum down. John has to lift Henry’s head to tip the drug down, to ensure he swallows it, and wipes the trickle of spillage from the corner of Henry’s mouth after, feeling like a failed Juliet.

When he eases Henry back down after the bottle is empty and takes up his hand again, he does not waste his time with the question of what comes after this. Whatever there is left, the paltry sum of it disappears when he can no longer feel the beat of Henry’s heart in his wrist. 

**Author's Note:**

> catch me on [tumblr](http://worstsir.tumblr.com).


End file.
